In May 2011, after four years of life on McNutt's Island, we moved to Montreal. This blog remains, though, as a (sort of) daily record of our time on the island, and a winding path for anyone who would like to meander about among its magical places. For additional perspectives and insights I recommend Greg's book, Island Year: Finding Nova Scotia (2010), and my Bowl of Light (2012). I'll continue to post once in a while. If you do want to read this blog, one option would be to begin at the beginning of it (which is, as we all know, in blog-world, at the end), and read forward, concluding with the most recent entry. It's a journal, really, so it does makes more sense if you read it that way. But, you know, read it any way you like.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Looking around our house


Our house has four rooms: living room, kitchen and two bedrooms. We also have a breezeway sort of place and a bathroom.In the old days there were two bedrooms upstairs but when we arrived here there was only one.  Also in the old days there were three rooms on the first floor which we turned into one big living room, and that is pretty much where we live.  Especially in the winter.  Our house is 1300 square feet.   The original house is the living room, the bedroom above it, and the kitchen.  There's a stone cellar beneath the kitchen, also original.  The original house was built in the 1850s.  The addition was put on sometime in the early twentieth century, I guess -- it's just another old house that got moved here from somewhere else on the island.  We made some changes in the addition but not so much in the original house. 






The living room was a narrow front room, with two small bedrooms behind it. Now it's all one room. One amazing thing about the living room is the moulding below the windows. Someone -- probably William Perry, who built the house -- cared a great deal to add this lovely detail in the front room. Greg replicated the moulding beneath the back windows, and continued the chair rail around the room.  So he gave the whole big room the original "front parlour" look.  We also took down the wooden ceiling and left the exposed beams. They wouldn't have had exposed beams in the 1850s but it gives the room some height and allows warmth to float upstairs into our otherwise unheated bedroom.   Since it's all one big room, the morning light pours in the eastern windows and the afternoon light pours in the western ones.  That's Elizabeth Hyde's shepherd crook hanging on the new centre beam.  The beam is a tale in itself.



Here's our bedroom. The Goulden family, who owned the house after the Perrys, had seven sons and four daughters.  I think the sons slept up here.  Greg mostly just painted up here, but he also made additional doors into the kneewall so we could have storage space.  The quilt on the bed was Elizabeth Hyde's. It was made by a woman in Lockeport, I think. The blue desk is the teacher's desk from the McNutt's Island school.  Some of the teachers wrote their names inside the desk drawer.   

We feel a great deal of continuity with all the families who lived here before us -- the Perrys, the Gouldens, the Demings, and Elizabeth and her children.  It is somehow still their house, too.  


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

...lovely place, absolutely...and the interior photography is very well done (my hobby) with every detail nicely exposed...

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the site. I saw your posting on the NYT article on living rooms and your house struck a chord. I have a 1905 fishermans house on the Oregon coast. The original layout is almost identical to yours. A shed addition was put on one end in the 1920's, expanded in the 30's that now houses the kitchen and a bedroom. At about the same time, one of the back rooms was split into the bathroom and a hall to the other back room, the new bedroom and the stairs.

Anonymous said...

What a charming, enchanting place! I like that you kept the integrity of the house - it looks as though it has been there forever, and that it is exactly where it belongs.

LynDee Lombardo said...

I came to visit your house by way of the NYTimes article on living rooms. I love your house. You refreshed my memory on the term "kneewall"...the most fabulous use of space for storage. The house I did most of my growing up in had a kneewall storage area in my parent's bedroom over 20 feet long. And as a quilter/textile person I can't sign off without noting the log cabin quilt in the bedroom. Thanks for inviting me to your space. LDL